Colloquium: Lisa Goffman

The following Colloquium will be presented by the SPHS Department and the SPHS PhD Organization.

Monday, March 9, 2009
4:00-5:00 p.m.
Speech and Hearing Building, Room C141
Reception to follow

Dr. Lisa Goffman, Professor of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences, will present, "Motor contributions to the acquisition of normal and disordered language."

Abstract:
The acquisition of language relies on perceptual and motor experiences and biases. While perceptual factors have received much attention, motor contributions to the normal and disordered development of language have been less well investigated, even in the face of increasing evidence that children diagnosed with specific language impairment (SLI) show concomitant gross and fine motor deficits. Our research program attempts to bridge this gap by directly measuring articulatory and manual movement output as children and adults engage
in various production tasks. The hypothesis is that motor and language capacities interact and that these interactions change over the course of development.

This talk will include two groups of studies. In the first, I will present findings that incorporate methodologies from speech motor control and from psycholinguistics to assess how grammatical, lexical, and phonological processing levels are linked to articulatory output. I will then turn to findings regarding speech and generalized motor deficits that have been identified in children with SLI. All of this work together will be applied to a model of developing speech production in which language and motor units both play critical and interacting roles.